At BuroHappold, we believe that the best solutions to the most complex challenges are underpinned by robust understanding and insight. That’s why we ask the big questions, challenge thinking and collaborate with clients, partners and citizens to deliver a truly integrated understanding of today’s urban challenges.

From our very first project we have used our intricate knowledge of the industry to push the boundaries and achieve more. It is this commitment that sets us apart, that adds value, that makes us award winning. We apply the same level of complex thought and specialist expertise to every project we work on.

Described by our clients as ‘passionate’, ‘innovative’, ‘collaborative’, BuroHappold Engineering is an independent, international engineering firm built up over the last 40 years, delivering creative, value led building and city solutions for an ever changing world.

BuroHappold is a people practice. The diversity of our staff is what makes us unique. Their skills and expertise, along with their creative, enthusiastic personalities, enquiring minds and creative flair are what maintains our innovative edge.

The enduring principles set out by our founding partner Sir Edmund ‘Ted’ Happold were care, value and elegance. We still adhere to this ethos today, offering a full range of engineering services and expertise to meet your project needs and create truly inspirational world class buildings and environments around the world.

In the construction world we design and make our built environment – the very fabric of our civilisation. There is room for an immensely diverse range of talents and what we tackle demands people with many different specialist skills; Thinkers, doers, analysts, generalists....equipped to deal with all aspects of the built environment.

The Living City: resilient connectivity of SMART infrastructure

Information technology systems deployed within the Living City are designed to provide local government and urban communities with a seamless SMART experience; computers and intelligent devices operating autonomously (and quietly) in the back ground of day to day life. Achieving this seamless experience is the continuity challenge that needs to be confronted by city leaders, urban planners and in some cases the community and individual citizens.

In the UK the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI)‎ provides advice and guidance on maintaining secure resilient infrastructure. Elsewhere in the world and in the wake of recent high-profile natural disasters, city planners are beginning to embrace resilience as the new norm particularly for data communications infrastructure deployed in urban environments.Designing ICT and SMART city systems capable of ensuring resilient connectivity requires a step change in attitudes towards telecommunications infrastructure which needs to be acknowledged (officially) as the fourth critical utility. The extent of telecommunications infrastructure to be encompassed within a SMART city continuity plan should include (but not be limited to):

Effective management of data centres and computer rooms (arguably the fifth critical utility) inside and outside the confines of the city is also vital, particularly with the emerging reliance of private and public organisations on cloud services.

Uptime is a phrase used colloquially (and contractually) in the IT and telecommunications industries where it has always been acknowledged that no system is completely resilient to failure. With this in mind some organisations are beginning to develop proposals and systems that enable individuals and communities to continue to communicate and therefore function within the wider context of the city, even when disaster strikes. One such organisation, the Open Technology Institute, has developed an ad hoc, open networking platform called Commotion which empowers existing Wi-Fi enabled devices (e.g. laptops, smartphones, home wireless routers etc) to network directly and form a distributed (wireless mesh) communications infrastructure. Once deployed within the local community Commotion can even be used to mitigate day to day issues such as broadband poverty through shared internet connectivity as well as maintaining neighbourhood communications during a catastrophic event which may bring about the collapse of other ICT and communications infrastructure.

The physical security of SMART ICT infrastructure deployed within the Living City is every bit as important as the logical or cyber security issues discussed regularly in the media. Issues for telecommunication and computer rooms supporting SMART city systems include:

The transmission of SMART city data across cabled and wireless media and associated interfaces should be monitored via network control centres where staff will watch for unusually high rates of dropped data packets along with quality of service issues. Infrastructure monitoring systems should flag accidental or malicious breaks in transmission e.g. disconnected drop and patch cables etc.

Finally the transition from copper cables, the legacy communications infrastructure deployed in most UK towns and cities, to optical fibre doesn’t provide automatic protection against malicious network hacking. Photonic transmission in communication networks still requires encryption to mitigate against the physical tapping of fibre optic cables where access to 1% of light will provide hackers with access to 100% of the data on that network…